But after I'd said yes and plowed through about half of my wedding-planning checklist, I started to feel very engaged. I told him I might like to move into the city, at least for a few years while we were still young ... but he balked at how expensive that would be. He talked about having kids in a year or two ... but I had barely gotten started on the career I'd always wanted as a magazine writer. I stayed out late with friends. He called to ask where I was. I felt guilty.

And then one day I looked in the mirror and saw that someone had cut my hair into a frumpy bob and dressed me in longer skirts and baggier pants that were so not me. I'd become so concerned with hair appointments and makeup options for my future wedding day that I'd forgotten to be the admittedly vain -- but also, I like to think, sexy and fun -- woman my fiancé had fallen in love with. I'd grown, without even noticing, to look respectable, taken, off the market, ready for motherhood.

Engaged. Just the word itself implies a certain narrowing of scope, a choosing of one thing to the exclusion of all else. No other options will be entertained ... I am engaged. I felt trapped. I had lived my whole adult life for this man, moving wherever his life took him, living in the condo he chose, following his every carefully laid plan, and now I was promising to live the rest of my life for him. I still didn't doubt my love for him, and yet I couldn't breathe.

I wanted my relationship and my freedom. Married friends scoffed and said that wasn't possible. But when I thought back to the last time we were deliriously happy together -- just after taking a "break" from each other while he was in grad school -- I thought maybe ideal wasn't so unattainable.

I knew he wouldn't go for the kind of break most couples take as a wimpy precursor to breaking up -- the kind where they go sleep with other people to prove to themselves someone else wants them before they say goodbye. And that kind of break was beside my point, anyway. We just needed time apart to think about the bigger questions -- where we'd live, whether we'd have kids. And I needed time to remember why I liked having him around. Basically, I wanted to trick myself into missing him. And I was pretty sure it would work.

I daresay it would work for a lot of other couples, too. Sure, some pairs can't stand to be apart for more than a day, those "you complete me" types who are, it seems, made for marriage and all its personal-boundary-invading glory. But the rest of us -- a growing contingent if all this divorce and cheating stuff I read about is accurate -- have a kind of bipolar relationship with the idea of happily ever after. We love it! We want so much to believe in it! We cannot share health insurance without it! And yet we also get these urges to live for ourselves -- choose our own career paths, act on our own authentic desires, whether it's to live in an apartment near Central Park or let the dirty dishes pile high in the sink.

We are told, over and over, that compromise is the key to making marriage work. To me, that meant: I will go away for a certain amount of time to do the things I want to do, both big and small. You will stay here and do the things you want to do. When I return, we will have done some things we each wanted to do alone. And we will have the added bonus of extra-hot reunion sex. Everyone wins.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I didn't see the solution so clearly at first.

We were too busy scrimping to pay for and then furnish our home and working like hell to get our dream jobs. We became this efficient little unit that had locked everything down to make sure nothing would happen to or in or even near our little love nest. And then we didn't need anything anymore, not as a couple. So we shut down.

Then suddenly our one-bedroom condo felt cramped. We came home from work every day around 7, said hi to each other, cooked our own separate little dinners, and watched TV. My fiancé went to bed; I went an hour later. We could go for days without a kiss or even an accidental brush. If we did talk, we'd run into a fight or a teary three-hour talk (this is where the moving to New York and the having of kids was discussed ad nauseam but never solved). All that tension led me to spend a lot of time out with my friends, which caused him to grow resentful, which made me feel claustrophobic and thus rebellious. So the next time I would stay out later, and the next week I would stay out later more nights, until I was barely home anymore.

We tried a string of marriage counselors -- one who told us we were getting old so we might as well settle down, one who was obsessed with having us tape our conversations at home and then listen to them in therapy, one who was perfect but wasn't covered by either of our insurance plans. We felt despondent and stalled.

Finally, the choice came: Either we order invitations that second or we put off the wedding. He pushed for invitations, and, telling myself I didn't like the card stock or font options that much anyway, I improvised: How about a destination wedding? What if we called off the big extravaganza with its puff pastries and tea lights and instead said our vows on some undetermined future date on a beach in Jamaica? We even checked a few resort Web sites and found -- yes!-- this would save us money. It seemed irresponsible not to cancel. I loved this solution: We were not getting married, at least not imminently. And yet, on some undetermined future date, we were.

I thought maybe we could just hang out in this fuzzy dreamland forever. It was very pretty, full of scenic brochures for wedding-friendly Caribbean resorts. But no such luck. Eventually my fiancé wanted to, you know, pick one of these resorts. Maybe call them up, choose a date, give them some money.

But we hadn't figured out how to tackle what started all this: the fact that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the deadly doldrums we'd fallen into.

Recent Stories